Ethnic conflict - some NT insights from the 'Affective Turn'

This paper explores how biblical studies is engaging in fresh ways with questions of ethnic and religious conflict via a focus on emotions. Illuminating for 'contact' theorists, this may also challenge practical theologians studying Bible reading. As a test case, I explore the animal-eating vision of Acts 10 and its undercurrent of inter-ethnic and cultural disgust. Unusually, I focus on Peter's impulse to recoil from contact with the 'other' and show how this might be respected. Taking the text as a 'community nightmare' about foreigners, I explore how its vivid portrayal of alarm demands that we probe our own irrational responses to others. The resulting commendation of unity that accepts ongoing difference fits the NT's social context and speaks powerfully to our own. That the affective texture and essential message of this passage has been routinely obscured by theological biases should alert us to overly-simple pictures of the reading process.